Read The Heartbreaking Poems Of A Man Who Committed Suicide After Working In A Foxconn Factory

Tragic poems, penned by a Foxconn worker who committed suicide, are giving the world a glimpse of what life is like in the company’s Chinese factories.

Foxconn produces electronic products for a range of companies. Most famously it produces Apple’s iPhone. The company employs over 1 million workers. But the company has seen a multitude of suicides over the years.

Lizhi’s writing reached a wider audience when his friends collected his poems and published them in the Shenzhen News. They describe how Lizhi unsuccessfully sought employment in publishing and felt trapped in Shenzhen’s dormitories.

The Nao blog states: “By translating these poems, we aim to memorialize Xu, share some of his excellent literary work, and spread awareness that the harsh conditions, struggles and aspirations of Chinese migrant workers.”

In one piece, on life on a Foxconn assembly line, Lizhi begins: “Even the machine is nodding off/ Sealed workshops store diseased iron/ Wages concealed behind curtains/ Like the love that young workers bury at the bottom of their hearts.”

Lizhi’s death marks the latest, but his poetry allows his hopes and aspirations to live on — past the sprawling dormitories of Shenzhen’s factory, which in 2012 housed 240,000 workers, according to The Economist.

Lizhi’s obituary appears in the Shenzhen Evening News, among many of his poems.

Here’s one of his most provocative pieces — “I Fall Asleep, Just Standing Like That”: